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Yet another Eliezer Yudkowsky podcast. This time with Dwarkesh Patel. This one is actually good though.
Listeners are presumed to be familiar with the basic concepts of AI risk, allowing much more in-depth discussion of the relevant issues. The general format is Patel presenting a series of reasons and arguments that AI might not destroy all value in the universe, and Yudkowsky ruthlessly destroying every single one. This goes on for four hours.
Patel is smart and familiar enough with the subject material to ask the interesting questions you want asked. Most of the major objections to the doom thesis are raised at some point, and only one or two survive with even the tiniest shred of plausibility left. Yudkowsky is smart but not particularly charismatic. I doubt that he would be able to defend a thesis this well if it were false.
It feels like the anti-doom position has been reduced to, “Arguments? You can prove anything with arguments. I’ll just stay right here and not blow myself up,” which is in fact a pretty decent argument. It's still hard to comprehend the massive hubris of researchers at the cutting-edge AI labs. I am concerned that correctly believing yourself capable of creating god is correlated with falsely believing yourself capable of controlling god.
This has made it obvious that the /r/slatestarcodex community behaves radically different from the community of 2014.
The top comment on /r/slatestarcodex is:
We also have the "Can Eliezer even pass a calculus test" comment (+39) and "these videos are cringe and embarrassing" (+28).
The founding ethos of the community was centered around charity, scholarship, taking ideas seriously, with a strong disdain for personal attacks.
Now personal attacks are in, Eliezer has apparently fallen from grace, and it's more popular to baselessly speculate that he can't do Calculus than to engage with his actual arguments.
"I don't think Eliezer should be the face of the AI safety movement because he comes off as weird" is a perfectly fine thing to argue, but I remember when making disparaging remarks about someone was done regretfully and respectfully, not with zeal.
Rest in peace quokkas, the world was too harsh a place.
Charity is not well enforced unless comment is reported. One way around this is to use a lot of text and hide the dagger.
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I've been on the "Eliezer is a crank" train for years. This is the guy who proposed the virtue theory of metabolism.
He's also a middle school drop out due to extreme emotional problems. Or an "autodidact" as he puts it. But also he says he can only work a couple hours per day. I'm really doubtful of the quality of his self-education. Let's not overestimate his calculus ability. I seriously doubt he could pass a college calculus exam.
But to be fair I bet most college STEM grads would also not pass such a test. I'm a tech bro, there's virtually no calculus at my job. The principles from calculus are useful, but I almost never have used the equations outside of school. I also rather doubt Eliezer keeps practical calculus skills sharp through regular use.
And this is not meant as a personal attack on him. It is to balance charity with a realistic appraisal of his abilities.
Even if he couldn't pass a calculus exam right this second, he could almost certainly do it with 30-minutes of review first.
I guess I'm just the resident Yudkowsky stan, but it's clear if you've read his work that he has undergraduade-level understanding in most major fields of science. It's really not that hard to learn this stuff on the internet (It may have been tougher in Yudkowsky's day, but libraries were still a thing).
I agree. I think Yudowsky is really arrogant and dumb along some metrics, but he's definitely good at math. Probably not "professional mathematician" level, but absolutely at least "average STEM undergrad" level.
Like Scott and others, he's mostly a science writer, with a very high verbal IQ. There is not much evidence he's a 'math person'...no technical math papers published under his name in journals or preprints. He's like Cory Doctorow or Neal Stephenson in this regard.
One of his papers "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and
Negative Factor in Global Risk" 2008 has 695 citations according to Google. not bad. you cannot deny that he made his mark on society
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calculus is very broad concept . maybe most could pass intro calc
I think we are talking about the kind of undergrad exam where you have you have to evaluate a bunch of fairly difficult but still turn-the-crank type integrals and also some fairly easy ODEs.
I took undergrad and it was not like that at all. simple integrals, differentiation, and no ODEs. ODEs were not in my 1st year class.
Sounds about right. But I'm thinking about what would constitute a hard calculus exam while still being "just calculus".
I once bombed an exam a bit easier than the one I described, and it was actually the only subject I failed in Uni.
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I have to laugh because over here in Europe, that’s our high school math. Even ODEs were introduced there but not gone through in any meaningful depth.
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In terms of his appearance, I wonder if he is making a smart choice to wear the fedora and so signal "I know what I come across as and I'm not ashamed" rather than attempt to imperfectly try to hide that he is a nerd.
The fedora meme is not known as cringe outside of online circles making fun of "incels" and weebs, then again, I don't think I've seen anyone wear a fedora in popular culture anywhere for the last 20 years, except for the dapper-looking googler that claimed their LLM was sapient.
In one reality, it becomes a signal that EY is self-confident.
In another, it becomes a signal that he's a loser imagining sci-fi becoming real.
In either case, I don't see the fedora itself being the hinge point on whether he gets cast out as crazy or not. That depends on whether the podcasters-that-be decide whether to take him seriously or not.
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Eliezer is not well known enouigh outside nerd circles, never mind respected, to be able to countersignal.
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As much as I'd like to make an Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte joke, I don't think this is a case of an earnest nerd space getting coopted by trend-chasers. Most of those comments don't read to me as saying "Like, yikes. NERD", but rather, they want his arguments taken seriously and wish he'd present himself better for the normies.
/images/16809485218250294.webp
This comic misses the point it's trying to make. It focuses too much on the aesthetics of the participants. Ironically falling for the same thing it aims to highlight the negative effects of. And I'm really tired of this sentiment.
Let's say there is a group with objective X.
Newcomers are fine, as long as they stick to maximizing objective X.
Females are fine if they stick to objective X.
Dudebros are fine if they stick to objective X.
It's the derailment away from the objective that is bad, not that "normies" are coming in. And if you think you need to have bad social skills as a precursor to being (or wanting to be) good at things, reevaluate your model of psychology. This comic is especially cringeworthy to me. Why the fuck would you even use the term "dudebro" as a man? What he's too manly for you, a man of more refined tastes? You deserve to be made fun of. Stick to the objective instead of making it about how unmanly you are.
Eliezer is good at whatever he is inspite of his dweebiness not because of it. If someone can link me a positive correlation between dwebiness and IQ, I'm all ears but everything I come across points towards the opposite direction.
"Nerds" have a tendency to overcompensate in the opposite direction of "society" and just assume dweebiness is a proxy for competence.
I talked to my friend,
he's very high status too, he's a pimp, runs a stable of insta influencers. He gave me this source:https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php
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The objective of appearing manly or not cringe conflict with the objective of the hobbyist. You don't have to denigrate the other man's credentials as a gorilla warfare expert, but if you use his status scale, play his game, you'll lose and destroy your own game.
They probably won’t, because even in a place like this, normie status norms cast a long shadow, and proving correlation between intelligence and social/sexual failure is a self-own. Are you a moron or a loser? Neither, thanks, everyone answered.
Like conspiracy theorists, being a nerd requires a minimum of intelligence to understand the thing one is nerdy about. Cut off the low end, instant higher average int.
The "nerds" who make this claim are actually telling on themselves. If you are serious about a hobby, you want to be in a room that cuts off from the top of the X distribution, not cuts off the bottom.
I'll give a concrete example. The game CSGO has Official servers and Third-party servers.
Within the official servers, there is a casual mode and a competitive mode. Third-party servers are competitive only because the only people who would pay on top of owning the game are serious about it.
A - Casual mode in Official servers cuts off the top. Good players don't play casual.
B - Competitive official servers cuts off the bottom, the bad players don't play competitive, you would need a baseline level of tryhardiness in you to put yourself through that torture.
C - The Third party servers cuts off FROM the top. The best of the best players are exclusively found there only. (B actually cuts off the bottom and the top)
So imagine a guys who plays in B complains about too many players from A shitting up B. Well you ask yourself.. Why isn't he in C ?
In my observation with mostly video game communities, the truly skilled are safe from having their space shat up because that space usually comes with some sort of additional cost/gatekeeping.
I don't follow.
Under the assumptions you specified, yes. If you're complaining you're probably not as nerdy as you think, because you'd just be in C.
Wait, what? Why? Wouldn't that be a choice for a moderately dedicated casual?
Yes, but that's under the assumption that gatekeeping is allowed. It used to be a pretty hot culture war topic in nerdy spaces, which might color a lot of these conversations.
Yes, it is the choice for him. But it's hard to gather up sympathy for a casual complaining about his fellow casuals. It's not inconceivable to me that some communities can die off as a result of catering to the low-skilled, truly competitive communities however are immune to that.
E.g. No amount of Chess streamers will be able to shit up the chess community, it's ELO based. Chess is doing just fine with the recent influx of normies.
If your activity doesn't have a ranking system, you might just be better off accepting the fact that you yourself are a casual. But you are a casual who thinks he's more than that and are now upset because your peers are a reflection of you.
Back to that comic, a bunch of nerds play some card game, the card game itself probably doesn't have a high skill ceiling, and a steep learning curve (necessary for immunity), it's just a nerd community being taken over, the complaints are about the aesthetics not the skill.
Also the Motte is gatekept on skill. Those who shit up the space will eat a ban. Not for having the wrong opinions (aesthetics), but for sharing it badly (low skill).
Maybe the subreddit for Warhammer or whatever isn't. And I don't really feel that bad for them.
I don't think it's just aesthetics, it's about taking the game seriously, rather then using it as an excuse to hang out with people.
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The comic is an extremely popular meme representation of the pattern I'm talking about. I don't endorse the particulars of it, but do think what it descibes is basically true. The pattern is: thing-focused nerdy quokkas assemble in a space, build something socially powerful, and then the space is subsequently colonized by people-focused power-seeking outsiders. See: Silicon valley culture, 90s to present. (A tragedy described in a certain paranoid rant) And in a million little nerdy hobbies. (This being the farce.)
I do think bad social skills are deeply correlated with a certain type of raw creative energy. They are also correlated with being a quokka. This leads to getting Edisoned as a Tesla.
It's too many times in my life I've found out, on investigation, that my biggest programmer and intellectual heroes are poorly dressed weirdos who literally eat shit out of their toes, for example. Or look like Scott or Yud IRL. These sorts of highly capable misfits get shunted off to the side when it's time for an invention/hobby/movement to go mainstream.
The issue is, Yudkowsky is a nerd in the domain of sci-fi lore and tropes, but a people-focused power-seeking outsider to the AI research. For all his dweebiness, this is where his talent and motivations lie. He has never showed a iota of interest in object-level research before AIs started mogging people on the level of status competition. He has been reading Cialdini while thing-focused nerd-quokkas were reading Russell&Norvig and, yes, LeCun. So extreme is his people-orientation that, in fact, he believed evolutionary psychology and "Utilitarian Bayesian Decision-making" to be more deserving of a place in an AGI builder curriculum than anything about, say, proving convergence for adaptive optimizers. Actually his programming requirements were like "knows many languages". This is a boomer client's attitude to wage slave eggheads (Yud never worked for pay in his life, of course. Now I wonder who this reminds me of, there was some guru-like theorist of labour and stuff...)
The movement has not been coopted. It was an infiltration from the start. Qoukkas don't really create strong movements – or as Yarvin would have put it, Hobbits can't not be ruled by Elves. It's no surprise that AI experts struggle to refute Yud, and the strength of his argument isn't the reason. They're actual quokkas, getting bullied by a slightly dysfunctional and small-toothed, but trueborn sociopath. There hasn't been a bigger fish in the pond simply because more gifted and charismatic sociopaths pursued better feeding grounds.
"Can you pass a calculus test?" is the sort of bitter miscalculated pushback an inarticulate math nerd would come up with when a normie invades his turf. The end result is being put on a potential school shooter list, getting your MtG cards torn and receiving a wedgie to the giggling of Stacys.
That's really interesting. I came to SSC for the culture war stuff, not AI risk, and never spent much energy evaluating the "Big Yud is a fraud" claim that's been floating around since forever. It makes sense that there would be a food chain of clout chasers, though I never thought of it in quite those terms. Socially unimportant pools attract the least impressive scavengers.
I feel that's a bit unfair. While Marx was a NEET who indrectly caused more deaths than Genghis Khan, he didn't free-ride off other theorists who actually invented his ideas while barely understanding them. Marx cooked that souffle himself, for better or worse...
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Yes but today, for every misunderstood genius, there's ten assholes who are just misunderstood. You're knee deep in Berkson's paradox, there is no correlation between being an ugly antisocial dweeb and brilliance, they're actually negatively correlated, rather the apparent correlation is because if you're that much of a loser and you're not brilliant no one ever notices you.
agree. survivorship bias means we only see the successful misunderstood geniuses or antisocial weirdos
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